What we are witnessing in what calls itself conservative but is really just regressive media in the west today is not journalism in the classical sense - it is court ritual, a choreography of flattery and fear. It has become sycophantic because it no longer serves truth but instead power and no longer enlightens but anesthetizes. In periods of higher consciousness, we had counsels of wise elders in democratic organization. In dark age kingdoms, monarchs were almost never the Walt Disney version of a philosopher King or Queen but we're instead more Alice in Wonderland "off with his head" egomaniacal psychopaths. Thus empires had to be built on lies where the person at the top was told they were good when they were instead really bad. Courtiers surrounded them echoing his words, magnifying his myths, and shielding him from the murmurs of the real world. The same drama is now enacted nightly across millions of glowing screens from thousands of different grifting sources.
A sycophantic media ecosystem thrives not on inquiry, but on affirmation. It tells its audience what they already believe, and praises them for believing it. It replaces curiosity with certainty, complexity with outrage, and civic responsibility with tribal belonging. The news anchor becomes a priest of grievance, dispensing indulgences to the faithful and casting heretics into the outer darkness. The result is a kind of psychic feedback loop, where propaganda is mistaken for revelation and emotional arousal for insight.
This sickness—because it is a sickness—emerges when truth itself becomes secondary to allegiance. When the purpose of communication shifts from discovery to domination, from illumination to the maintenance of hierarchy, the collective mind begins to rot. You can hear it in the language: repetition, simplification, scapegoating. The vocabulary of power replacing the language of understanding.
And yet, this sycophancy is not merely a media problem; it is a societal symptom. When people feel unmoored, afraid, and disoriented, they long for voices that promise stability, even if those voices lie. Con man media has learned to exploit that longing, converting insecurity into obedience. It does not speak truth to power; it speaks comfort to power and fear to everyone else.
But the antidote lies, as always, in self-education and awareness. To recognize sycophancy for what it is—a theater of control—is to rob it of its enchantment. Real journalistic media, the kind that nurtures democracy, seeks truth, invites discomfort, encourages doubt, and awakens thought. It treats the citizen not as a customer or a convert, but as a participant in the great conversation of an evolving civilization.